Hey everybody. Welcome to listen Money Matters. The world is what you make it. If it does not fit, make alterations, my name is Matt and I'm here. As always with Andrew Andrew, how are you? And what are you drinking? A great man, great and I actually have an iced coffee law. Brought back from where from WWE? Nah Starbucks is way too expensive, man. Oh yeah, especially because our guest on, I can't go with the fancy coffees today and they have to go
For the is that that it's not. That's a fancy coffee though. You're drinking. No. It's just like a local Mom and Pop shop and is actually the best coffee around really like and real love was put in Hope and Hoboken. Yeah. The best coffee in Hoboken. Yeah. Absolutely I don't know about around. I mean I guess around you. There's Oren's in New York, they have strong strong coffee, my wife loves that, I am drinking coffee as well. I have B and B, which is burlap and bean coffee, it's roasted and here in Philadelphia and
Black and tan. It's very good and I'm quite happy with this a little too early to start drinking beers. But, you know, we'll get to that soon enough. And so if you guys have catch phrases like today's catch, phrase is the world is what you make it. If it does not fit, make alterations that was sent in by our buddy, Daniel Merrill at the Duke. Daniel is his Twitter handle and you can send those catchphrases in Via Twitter. Our Twitter handle is at Money Matters man. And I will Matt, will say anything? I yes he has no shame.
A, I have no shame. Send me your worst. And speaking of men, we have a guest on the show today that I'm really excited to talk to, I want to introduce Mister Money. Mustache, let me introduce them. Don't you jump in? You should hold your soldier who arses. Mister Money, Mustache, how are you, man?
What's up, guys? Thank you for the invitation.
Oh, absolutely. You know, I was, I woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago and my brother, except for work. I work from home and he says,
You know, you guys should do a show about early retirement. I said, yeah, yeah, we're going to have Mister Money Mustache on. He goes, that's who I was reading like, okay, so perfect. He's like, I want to hear that. Well, it's happening now.
So that's pretty cool. We were connected by the readers, I guess I mostly heard about you guys because of your, your new career as rock stars. /, white rappers. Right? Right. Right. Is it just Matt who's it in this video is or Andrew? Are you
there? It's just me. Although yeah, but we are planning on doing a short little 60.
And rap where I'm going to, we're going to attempt to have Andrew wrap, right? I could do it. I listen to J5. Yeah, we'll see. So I do want to talk about early retirement but I want to ask where did the name Mister Money Mustache? Come
from. Well I suspect it's sort of like listen money matters because when I was analyzing your name notice it's got the same kind of catchy number of syllables and through the word is money and I think you just pick something that sounds good and but you have on us
I imagine right. Sometimes not right right now. I would consider myself to not have a mustache, okay,
but yeah. Are you are you waiting for November?
No. Well, if I am, I'd better actually get started. Now if I wanted to look anything, like, my Twitter picture. But yeah, but yeah, it's one of those things, you pick something that sounds good, and I just think of like Magnum PI and old western Gunslingers in the seniority of the mustache, and I thought that that just went really well with a financial
Guru. I'm sure. Why not?
Let the Monopoly, man.
Oh, well, not like him. He's kind of like, you know, a bit of an evil capitalist and he's dorky and he's like, completely physically undeveloped. So, I don't like to be related to the Monopoly, man. You
don't have a monocle. You don't rock it Michael. You don't, you know, a pudgy black and white, man.
Yeah, yeah. Don't don't connect Mister Money Mustache to the Monopoly guy. It's fair enough.
So, for those of you who don't know, Mister Money Mustache is the website Mister Money Mustache.com and you, you know what,
Things that I was surprised about. I had thought that you had started the website and then the website is what got you into early retirement. But that actually isn't the case you had you got into early retirement way before the
website. Yeah that's true. It was like several many years like six years of regular happy retirement. I thought I was just leading a normal life until I started to look around me and I noticed like hey how come all my friends aren't doing this too though had good jobs like why is everyone still living paycheck to paycheck? So eventually out of frustration
Duration, I started this blog like look everybody, everyone's Totally Miss managing their money and
I'm just going to teach the
world how it's done. So that's the idea behind on Mister Money,
Mustache. Well, tell me a little bit about your early days on and how and why you decided to retire early and how that whole thing took
place, it was kind of for me, just a Natural Choice. So I grew up in this other country called Canada and it's like a little bit less fancy than the United States, so people don't have as much.
Money and relax. They didn't when I was growing up anyway. And so then I transplanted myself to the US because of work opportunities and I kept my Canadian spending habits and I found that money accumulated because I didn't buy quite as many cars as everybody else and didn't go out to dinner quite as often. It turns out, when you don't spend all your money and invest it, then it tends to grow. And then, eventually the returns from your investment are enough to live off. And, of course, the less you need to live off. This sooner, this happens. So
That just happened. I felt like I was living a pretty fancy life actually, but apparently I wasn't and then then I no longer need it to work right around. 8:30, just before my 31st birthday. So I quit the job and just lived off of things like investment dividends and rental house income. And now here we are like nine years later and it's still going well, except now I'm writing about it which is become almost like a job, but it's a really fun job where there's no boss.
So I just want to say, it's not like you don't go.
To dinner one less time and you you know, you're spending like everyone else. You you live a nice life style but you spend like an
insanely low amount. No no that's not correct. I spend like a huge huge amount but it's just slightly less ridiculous than the average rich person in this country.
Interesting how much do you spend like how much you spend to live? It's like you, your wife and your want your son?
Yeah. Yeah. We have like an almost nine year old and we don't really watch our spending. We don't have a budget, we just kind of
spend as much as we see fit but then we do keep track of it and at the end of the year, add up all the bills on the credit card. And it's been adding up to about 25,000 dollars a year and there's a bit of cheating involved because there's no mortgage expense in that. You know part of my idea of investment was paying off the house so really you'd have to crank that up to more like 40,000 if you want to compare apples to apples spending with a typical family with like you know, an average mortgage.
Yeah, I actually want to find out how you did this.
Because you are. So you're from Canada, you went to school in Canada, right? Yes, that's true. And after school in Canada, what did you end up doing in the states? Like, what was the opportunity to? I brought you over to the states? Well,
first, I graduated and I worked in Canada. So, I went to engineering school software, engineering. Okay. And then, I worked a few years in that field in Canada and then this is like in the late 90s, and then I read in all the engineering magazines, like career opportunities are great in the states and you get paid more and there's lower taxes.
Has so and it's like a big brain drain and everyone's moving there, so I thought I would try it. So I just sent my resume out to bunch of interesting sounding places and got some job interviews and took a job here. And then you know it's pretty easy for people to move you know if you have a good degree in a good job it's easy to move between these two countries because they're connected to the Free Trade Agreement. So that was fun. I'm really glad I did it and I moved to Colorado because of the lifestyle seem to match my values of like mountain bikes and Outdoors.
Not working too hard. Hmm, and that's the history of that. So
and so you ended up you had a job. And how long did you work at that job before you were able to? And and, you know, you had this you're working and you are, I'm Stewart making decent money and just stashing. It away, not spending it, investing it. How did you end up accumulating this wealth during that time to, you know, say at 30 years old that I'm done. I'm, I'm retiring,
right? Well, I didn't, I didn't really keep Exact Track because I didn't realize I was going.
Become Mister Money, Mustache. Sure at the time, but I kind of recreated it from my best memories at one point. Making this post. I made this blog article called a brief history of the stache. How we saved from zero to retirement in nine years and it's all about all these years from like graduation. And what happened? And how much I earned. And then just step through the years and things got faster and faster as I went along because, you know, your gains are compounding and you get better at living and efficient lifestyle and you've kind of bought all the crap.
Need early on so then you're spending drops and so that's how, that's how it worked out. So and of course I had a girlfriend now wife who was also on board with the program. So she was earning to and you know, we didn't have our kids too early. We waited until we were after 30, which helped didn't have a bunch of dogs or other vacation houses are Yachts. So all these things, add up to, you know, basically being able to live on less than half of what you take home. And that's really what, that's the real formula for early.
Retirement is living on less than half your money, living on less
than half and then doing what with the other more than half
you invested in whatever you want. So I would recommend index funds, like Vanguard index funds like the total stock market us index combined with total International fund. And the reason this is good is because you're not trading, you're not incurring like crazy losses and selling when the market goes down with everybody else, you're collecting dividends a whole while and over time like you know, a seem to get past the 1 DEC.
The period. You really start to feel smart for doing that kind of investing because you realize it's a lot better than these Cowboy investing or actively managed funds or, you know, precious metals where just goes up and down, for no
reason. Speculation like that. Right. You don't you, where did you learn all of this like just on your
own? Yeah, was from books. I mean, I went through engineering so it's, you're always encouraged to have kind of an analytical mindset and study up on facts instead of just repeating the current trend of the day.
So I read a lot of books on investing as I was growing up through soon as I became an adult and started having money than I was wondering what to do with it. So, I read investing books and then I realized you don't have to reload investing books, you just buy index funds and it's it's pretty much the best way to go anyway. Well, this is the book. What was the
book that like really spoke to you?
I have a whole list of them. It's hard. I don't even have a single one but you know there's one good one this called the four pillars of investing by William Bernstein.
It's pretty good or if you look up anything from John Bogle, he's like the founder of Vanguard. Yeah, is another good recommendation? Or you could just read everything that Warren Buffett has ever written and all the books about him. And even though he doesn't talk so much about personal investing, he more tells his own story, The fundamentals that he illustrates through his anecdotes really help, you understand what the economy is all about like what the whole idea of human productivity and helps turn you into a calm long-term investor. Which is I think is the
a real way to make money in the long run.
Yeah. And I recently had a quote from John Bogle that I love which is instead of finding the needle in the haystack, just by the haystack. Yeah. And then I agreed to do it and that idea of, you know, investing in funds and the entire stock market as opposed to individual stocks or precious metals or things that go up and down and you know, ending up becoming a day trader for, you know,
for what it's yeah. That's true. But the other thing is too because I kind of focus, not so much on investing because it is
Simple and I focus on how to get much of your earnings, like a lot of your earnings into those Investments, because that's the real thing that's missing in America, as everyone's got these super piddly like five to fifteen percent, savings rates and they think they're doing fine. And meanwhile, they have like a brand-new $30,000 car or they have hundreds of dollars per week in restaurant, budgets and fancy coffees, and all this other stuff and there's nothing like morally wrong with that. But if you want to get ahead, you can't be.
Doing that stuff, you know, unless you've got a four hundred thousand dollar salary where it doesn't matter if you're in regular mortal land, you've got to get a little bit badass about optimizing your spending and later on, you can relax because you're going to have so much more money that you won't have to be efficient for your whole life. But, what I find is the habits that I picked up as a 20 year old, are still sticking with me today, and I really enjoy it. Like, I still ride a bike everywhere and I pull my groceries home in a bike trailer, not because I can't afford a BMW 7 Series, right?
Because that's a better way to live for me and I'm never going to have the Beamer now because the bike makes me happier. So it's a really great, you know, it's a great lifestyle adjustment to make when you're
young. Yeah. And it's exercise.
Yeah, exactly. That's the whole thing. Like you got to be outside for as many hours a day as you can and you need a few hours of Hard Exercise per day, like doing something and that's totally lost on our culture. Like, everyone thinks if you just do 30 minutes on the treadmill then that's good enough. It's not, man. You got to be out like a caveman or
Give woman doing stuff all day especially as you get older. And that's, that's the lifestyle to Aspire to in my, in my view.
Yeah. And I like how you mentioned that the investing part is easy, right? With index funds and those things. That's that's the easy part, although that seems to be the part that everyone focuses on because that's what makes money. You know.
Quote-unquote, that's true. You're right. There's a lot of money and writing about investing and that's probably why we read so much about it. There's not much money and telling people not to buy anything, right? So that's why I only
Tired. People can do that kind of writing like me because I don't
need to know affiliate program.
Yeah,
so that's that. Alright, so I want to go back to this, you know, the 60% of your, your focus is trying to put as much money into Investments as possible when you first started out and you said, you've kind of you grew up with this idea that, you know, spending a lot of money wasn't really a thing so it was kind of ingrained in you, right?
Yes, it's Lee. What's the biggest struggle now that you have the blog and we'll go into that in a second. But now that you have that you're out reaching out to listeners. What is everyone's struggle seemed to be? Why is it such a hard thing to stop spending money, you know?
That'll have a good ending to that question. Like why is it so hard to stop spending money
really? It's got to be a cultural thing because to me it seems just bizarre what people are doing and they think it's normal. Like I have this article I'm working on that's called when Ridiculousness is ubiquitous and it Rhymes nicely but it's also it's also true. Like people just think what they're doing is appropriate. Like they think it's okay to borrow money for our car and they think it's okay to drive like one mile to the
Or and all these other little things that to me, that just blows my mind. Like, I'd never do it, but to the average person, it's just regular Behavior because they're modeling and on other people they've seen. And if you watch TV all the, there's no mustache Ian's on TV, there's no frugal people, it's all like, you know, just regular people with brand new clothes and new cars in there. No one's riding a bike on the TV shows. So, you just copy what you see, the other humans, doing mmm, and lo and behold, you have no money left over when you do that.
Hmm.
And that's interesting because I didn't assume that Canada was this place that was Frugal because if we will country is it?
Well it's kind of lost a little bit of its frugality during the 15 years since I left there because they've just had this massive oil, boom combined with a lot of immigration of wealthy people from other countries like like Hong Kong and and China and stuff like that. So there's a lot of money circulating there sloshing around it inflated, the housing market. And I think the regular hockey playing
Beard plaid shirt Canadians have maple syrup hugging. Yes. So now they all have like Hyundai Genesis bought on credit and they're wondering whether they're actually I think in a worse personal debt position than the US was in at the peak of our 2008. You know, over-leveraged crisis. And their house is it's like $600,000 for crappy vinyl clad townhouses, now, yeah. All these places that are much less nice than where I live now in the u.s. so they'll get there.
Lessons some day, but we got to look back to the 70s, you know, and my own upbringing to take inspiration from Canada like, you know, our parents had, they never borrowed money for cars. They had always just had like these old manual transmission hatchbacks, and you just kind of we didn't go out for dinner a lot. We did a lot of stuff at home and worked hard in the gardens and stuff. So that's, that's the kind of roots, we need to get back to as an entire Society because it's more satisfying living. That's the number one. And by far the most important reason
Number two, is it it fixes your money situation in a breeze? Like it's just awesome. How much more wealthy you end up when you do that.
So I kind of feel that people understand like that that message, but maybe they don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like, how did, you know, when your end of working line was and like, how can people kind of find that light so they can see. Oh, I, if I do this, I only like 5 years left.
That's true. Well that's something that that the investing books kind of taught me. I would say because you don't automatically know how much money you need but it turns out there's a really simple formula you just take your spending which you should really be keeping track of on a monthly and then an annual basis. So let's say $25,000 if you multiply that, number by 25 roughly, that's how much money you need invested in order to be able to quit working forever. So if you spend $25,000 a year, you need about 625
Allison. If I'm remembering that number correctly to be retired forever. If you spend a hundred thousand a year, you need 2.5 million invested to sustain that living style. So so anyway, once I figured that out and I figured my spending was a certain amount. I think it might have been around 25 or 30 with my guest when I was still working and then I saved up and my wife and I had total Savings of somewhere like around 800,000 when we quit working which sounds like a lot but it's really
Ali, not once you get into the habit and you do this for more than five years if it goes surprisingly quickly. So that was enough 800,000. If you do the 4% rule, which is another way of saying, the 25 thing in Reverse that's enough to generate about 32,000 of cash flow per year and that's enough for us to live off. So we figured that's enough, let's quit. And of course, when you quit, you don't actually never do anything again. You you embark on the next stage of your life, which if you're young it
Will involve earning money but it won't be like you know, some crappy cubicle job. It'll be the job of your dreams or the hobby of your dreams. I try to kind of encourage courage. People to think retirement is not the end of work anymore. I had to redefine it now. Retirement is the end of mandatory work.
Hmm. And that's kind of where I wanted to go because I know there's a lot of people one, they work till 60, you know, for quote unquote, the man. And then it's like, they don't even know what to do. Because
I just have too much time so like you're afraid you're going to retire and have a nothing like how did you handle that? Like did you have a plan of what you're going to do when you retired?
I sure did and it's kind of a slippery slope because the longer you work in a job humans are really habit Brown creatures, right? So if you are like the paper pusher for like the XYZ government department and you do it from age, 25 to 65, you're going to burn out your brain and lose a lot of your other interests so that when you quit that job,
You really might have nothing to do other than go play Bingo and knit some scarves or something. Now the younger you are not only be ageist because a lot of older people maintain their creative spark as well. But for to a certain extent I was I was young and I was still in the learning stage in my life. So I was excited to quit my regular software job and just get on with the next stuff. And for me, I started a house building company, right? After quote retiring and because I was always interested in construction and I thought, well, I'm not good structure being all like, fine.
Carpentry. And yeah, learning stuff. And designing beautiful houses at
your engineering brain, right?
Yeah. And I'd always worked on my own houses and built stuff since I was a kid. So I thought this is the ideal and, you know, Pastime, let's do that. So I started this little company build some custom houses, but it was too stressful because I had a young baby who had just been born at the time, so I shut that company down. It was experiment, number one and then I moved into much more, casual stuff. And that's really agreed with me. And, you know, I just build things in my free time.
And I got into writing and parenting is a huge part of my, my job right now it's I feel like parenting is like a 10 to 12 hours a day job so so I'm plenty busy. So yeah, I don't know how I could possibly fit in a actual job in this life,
right? And as a software engineer, do you use any technology to manage your money? They give any
favorites. I do, I kind of use technology to manage everything and to make up for my inadequate brain. So I have everything as automated as I can.
So I'm still interested in and software and making computers do from do work for me. I just said everything to automatic, so most of my stock money is in Vanguard, so it's just set to automatically reinvested dividends and then I just log in and keep the portfolio. Sort of in Balance, very rarely like once or twice a year, which would just mean you know, if you have too many domestic stocks and I would want a bit more International, or whatever. That's very passive do. I don't mess with that much.
Just like all my bills to be automatically paid so I can't accidentally pay the credit card bill off late, right? And I like for rental houses, I only have one now, but I like that automatically deposited from the tenant into the account and that works out. So that's that's the extent of my technology. What about
budget?
I don't do budgets. I've never ever followed any kind of budget for us. It's kind of weird in that way. We just spend according to our values. So, like every time you're about to buy,
Thing you think, is this really the right purchase for me and decide? Yes or no? Quite often. It's no, like if you're on Target and there's an impulse purchase. Sure. Looking at you just say, well I didn't come here to buy this thing so I'm going to just sit in the back of my mind. And next time I'm at Target, which is probably be in six months, chances are I will have forgotten about it. Yeah, that's my idea of budgeting is just personal questioning at the time of purchase.
So I think a lot of people understand that like to go into Target oh and you and I just won't buy the thing but I think far fewer people actually don't have far fewer, people walk out with nothing. How do you kind of change that you know, how do you change that in other people? Or how do you change on yourself?
I'm not sure if I can, but that's kind of what the blog is designed to do. So it works on some people and that is number one, you gotta realize
Eli's what money is for. So money is not for buying yourself stuff, money is for Freedom. So anything you any stuff you buy is a direct subtraction from your freedom and then suddenly everything is getting weighed against. Well, I'm going to have to work longer and commute more to work and put up with Annoying co-workers, just to have this extra end table, for my couch or whatever. And suddenly, when you have this competition of what your money can be used for, it becomes a lot easier to save it because saving
Comes Fun and Powerful instead of sad and compromising. That's number one. And number two is embracing, hardship is a big thing. Like I a lot of people run from anything uncomfortable. Like I can't ride my bike, it's like 30 degrees outside. I returned that right? And I encourage people to think like, you know, anytime you do something that's challenging, that's a personal Triumph. And that's really what life, that's where the happiness in life comes from, is triumphing over adversity.
So change just that little subtle shift where you suddenly do things because they're hard instead of avoiding them because they're hard and realizing that's what makes you happy. That's great because that saves you a ton of money. It keeps you busy suddenly you don't have time to get like the Opera House season pass tickets or anything else. Because you're busy doing harder stuff like building yourself a fence and hundred degree heat, or learning to maintain your car, or learning to bike to work and all this other stuff that doesn't really cost
anything.
I want to take a break real quick. Cool. Yeah, we'll be right back. Get lasso dotco. Lasso is our Advanced WordPress plugin that will manage all of your affiliate links and it allows you to instantly monetize any link on your website with just a click of the mouse. So Andrew what is one of the things that you love about the thing that we built together for the last? I don't even know how many months years last. So what is like one of the things you like about?
It. My favorite feature is, how lasso goes and looks at all of the links that the external links that you have on your site. It groups them by domain and it shows them to you. So you can literally find massive on - sighs opportunities. Like, I was looking to Postmates, they have an affiliate program. I was liking to Uber. Well, have an affiliate program. Wait, so you were so you were unless the money matters, you were linking to Uber and linking to Postmates. Yeah. So why?
Because we have articles on like how to make money in a side hustle and you know, a hundred ways to make money fast and things like that. And so we have all of these things across the site. And it's like, oh well, I just mentioned them once. I'm not going to go through all of the trouble of setting stop it. Yeah. When he goes report last week is see. You know who you've linked to the most and just kind of attacked those relationships first. Oh, so what? So, what have you done recently Postmates? Yeah, Uber
TransUnion turns out. We willing to them a lot over the years. Their lives are sleeper hit right now. Wow. So what you do is you find the domains really or the, the websites that you link to the most with lasso, because we do have a domains report, right? I just go to Google and I type in that website, space affiliate Space Program. Uh-huh. And you, maybe come around again, get lather. That code now. Nice. Yeah, that's where you would hopefully, but right? And then you find the program. You sign up.
That
they give you the special URL. You go into lasso, you change the, you create you and your case you probably have to create a new lasso link. Yes. For you do like sewing and then when I create it, there's an opportunities Tab and it literally sucks. All those links in there and it's flip the toggle couple times. And it literally changes the links on your website. So I don't even have to log it. I don't have to go into the posts. It's awesome built for a lazy man like myself. Yeah, so for me, you know, Amazon just made that huge cut to their
your program and I make about 300 thousand dollars through Amazon Associates a year. So with lasso, I know exactly what products I'm linking to and how I can swap out all of those Amazon links for perhaps another affiliate program with a better commission rate and thank a lot of them right now. I know. Thank God I had last. So installing to be able to do this and so Andrew and I built last would help us manage and monetize our own affiliate websites and then we hope that you'll check it out too.
If you run a website on WordPress and if you make money with affiliate links or you want to make money with affiliate links, then visit get lasso dotco and you can try it free for 14 days which is unheard of in the plug-in space. Like you just can't try plugins but with get last so doc. Oh you can try it free for 14 days and again visit get lasso dotco right now and we're back. So I'm an engineer as well. And you know, engineers get paid pretty well and
And so the people that I kind of know and I'm sure you knew similar people, I tell them these things and I've also Fallen victim to it, but you know, I'd ask you what about vacations. You know, what, why don't you guys go to Spain and, you know, do like a whole thing. Like how do you? Yeah, also I don't know. And that question
great, I do I have traveled a lot and back in our working years before the kids, the kid my wife.
I travel a lot, you know, Australian New Zealand and Italy, and these other places. So this traveling is not necessarily all that expensive. You just got to shop for it in the same way that you would shop for anything else. I think it gets more expensive if you're always doing it like the compulsive travel in Colorado. For example, a lot of people go to the mountains, every single weekend and then I'll rent a place and they'll drive 200 miles back and forth. And they think that like, oh yeah, that's just a few bucks here and there, but that adds up to probably
Dollars a year for a lot of people. Yeah. And they don't notice it and then they think, oh, if only I could afford like a $1,200, all inclusive package to Cancun in the winter. Man travels so expensive without realizing the spending ten times more on just their local stuff and a lot of people fly around the country for weddings, you know. Even for people they don't like and spend a thousand bucks a pop. You know, you don't have to do that, you can concentrate on the Travel. That really means something to you. So yeah, it's still travel a lot now but
Tends to be. I'm getting this this like interesting Vibe where you're not saying like, don't go to Italy and you know, have gelato you're saying approach it differently and try and you know, find the deal and not just like the Splurge, right? Find the
deal and and make sure that you balance it in all your other times. Like there was a lot of times I could have gone on trips, but I didn't have time because I was I valued the other sounds like, oh my God.
A camping trip plan with my friends. So I don't have time to go to Italy and also guess which one costs less me, right. And I'm working on my house, for example, this year, I spent the whole winter rebuilding this house, an old 1950s house to become kind of a beautiful modern one, which I'm now speaking to you from my new office. Nice and I could have gone to a lot of foreign destinations over the winter, but I didn't have time because I was busy producing, something of value which was really fun to do as well and working with my
Ends and I was out in the sun all day and yeah and slinging Lumber. And so it's kind of neat if you make a list of what's best for you and what you would enjoy most and prioritize it and then sort it in order of cost as well. Yeah, and then just start picking according to that, you'll find you don't really have time to spend much money.
I wanted to get your take on the this tiny house movement is that something that's in your future?
Well, I'm a bit of a house slut right since that I like a luxurious dwelling. Okay. So that's one of my weaknesses. I always defined luxury as a weakness, so I don't think it sounds like.
What's that love? How slut
so, when people see my house? They're like, Ah, that's not, that's not mustache. In like, right mustache is gone. Soft. That looking looks like a design magazine and, you know, you were allowed to have our weaknesses as long as we can afford them. Yeah, my house is smaller. Like, I just down south
Downsized 2600 square foot house to like a 1500 square foot house, which is still a huge and fairly for three people. That's more than what most of the world gets to live in. I'm not really down with the idea of living and I like a 200 square foot house, like some people do, right. But I think it's awesome when they do and they're building a little selves. Yeah Marv. Yeah. And if you're single, that's a really great thing to do. And if you're younger or if you're older and badass, or maybe your kids have grown up,
Or maybe some people do it even with kids. And I that's crazy completely idolize this people. And I think it's a great idea. Yeah. So, tiny houses are a wonderful development and I'm glad they're catching on. And I've actually got a date with a girl, in San Diego to help her build a tiny house, so she can move out of her. Oh, cool. Regular house and into our own backyard and live in a tiny house and rent out our main house. So the idea we would come and stay in our guest quarters and we build this tiny house. And then
Profile it on the blog because it's actually pretty fast to build a tiny house. If you have the full skills and tools because it's such a small space but it's wonderful. We should all be thinking about smaller dwellings in quality over quantity and I should too. So I took one step in that direction now but we'll see you on might be able to man up over the years and and live in even less in the future. Yeah we'll see.
I have one question about was it hard to get your wife on board with this whole early?
Thing where she had just like you in that sense, or did you have to take some convincing? I
would say there's a little bit of convincing, she wasn't raised in the total, you know, like lawyer's daughter, pampering kind of way. But on the other hand she had adopted the Norms of our culture. So when she came and got her first adult job, you know, as a software person, she was making better money and it naturally just started to go to like the best in athletic clothing and brand new books.
Um, Amazon and you know, dinner lunches out with the co-workers at work everyday, totally fine stuff. But when she added up she realized like, wow, this is like 12 again like $12,000 a year of stuff. That's not really getting me anywhere. And as she did that for a couple years and then we kind of mutually realized. Hey, well, maybe we should do early retirement instead, especially if we're going to have kids in the future and that got a pretty motivated she's like, wow I don't have to work while I have kids if
I get to have my husband home too. If we just like cut out some lattes and books and athletic clothing. Well, that sounds good to me, huh? So I think sharing the dream of freedom and child-raising is often good if there's like a couple trying to get on board with the same things and also you have to realize you have to study a little bit of happiness and realize like the stuff is really not making you happy. So you're not making any sacrifice by giving up pretty much anything beyond food and water and
A shelter. Those are the real things, other than that. If you're looking for happiness, you should look towards friends and family rather than stuff and Handbags and expensive mountain bikes and
stuff. So I totally resonate with that by the way. And just, you know, I want to spend time with my wife and stuff like that. And I'm just curious because I know you live in Colorado, and it's at least very cheap there, compared
Where I live, New York City and I know that you've kind of talked on this stuff, but I want to, I want to hear your thoughts. You say, one on one hand, like you shouldn't live so far away from work. Like that is all so crazy because of commute costs and whatever. How would you handle something like the city? Where I live in a very small place with my wife. It is definitely not extravagant by any means but it's just expensive to be
be here.
That's true. Well, the rent is expensive in New York, but a lot of the other stuff is not expensive, not any more than the rest of the country, because we have such an amazing Trade Network in this country. So, like your groceries, you can still find a Costco and you can still, or you can still find local like ethnic kind of stores, so it's the same price to eat in New York. There were else. But of course, everyone chooses to go out and spend thirty five thousand on dinners per year just because that's the culture there. So, there's a lot of
People that read my blog that that live in Newark, New York in Manhattan, and they come back with these spending reports that are just barely more than what someone would spend anywhere else. Like, even in a cheap place, like Omaha, I'm kind of in a middle of the road cost of living place because I'm right next to Boulder, which is like Venture Capital minis. Yeah, many San Francisco deal. So, we don't have the super cheap housing, but then again, just separate housing from the rest of cost of living. Because really,
United States is an incredibly cheap place to live compared to almost any other developed country. And I get these reports from Europe all the time, they're like, oh I'm so jealous and then and then just get Innovative on your housing if you want. Like, you can rent an apartment or you can buy a multiplex in Brooklyn and then rent out everything else except for your unit and then do Renovations. And a lot of people, I know they are live for free or make a huge cash flow profit on living, so they have cheaper living than me, effectively. So, it's all about making special Arrangements.
Let's hack your own system if you want to live there and also you don't have to live there. That's one of my secrets as you don't have to live in New York. You can actually move anywhere you want. Yeah. If you can work from anywhere. Yes. And you can generally it because just get a new job especially in Tech. You can work there's Oodles of jobs, it will have you that will hire you regardless of where you are and if you are going to be in New York, make sure there's a reason, you know, if you have strong family ties, that's a good reason. If you're just in New York because you have like an
Thousand dollar your job and that's it. That's not a reason, you know, New York is a place to stay when you're making five hundred thousand. If you're going to make a tea, you might as well live in at an Omaha, or any other low-cost place. Or you can pick a tropical location like somewhere in Florida or somewhere. Yeah, my mountains. Yeah, right. Yeah. You just don't need New York as a place. It's expensive because there's a lot of high incomes there. So yeah. Stay if you can get one otherwise go somewhere else.
Yeah, you mentioned earlier about studying happiness, right?
And yeah, you mentioned friends and one of the struggles that I have is is with friendship and friendship with friendship comes peer pressure and peer pressure spending. How do you avoid that and, and having a contentious relationship with a friend who, you know, say wants to go out and, you know, drink a shitload of nice beers and like eat frog wall and all these, you know, fancy things. How do you avoid letting someone down or you know feeling like your I don't want to hang out with this guy.
Cuz he's being cheaper Frugal you know you know you know what I mean?
Yeah well it's a tricky one yeah because you you can slowly prune and adapt your friends. That's one option you know because you're as overtime friends fade in and out there's always new ones and there's always a old ones and sometimes older ones drift away. If you, you know, if you enjoy suddenly you might find yourself enjoying the company of people, who aren't just into sitting at restaurants eating, and you might enjoy people who are like hikers instead or cyclists.
Yeah, that's what happened. What's happened to me? You know I kind of drifted away from the consumer e friends, not that I don't like them but we just don't have as much in common to do, you know, because they're like, hey let's go do $100 happy hour and I'm like, I kind of wanted to go camping this weekend, you know. Can't we get packed up early, and go and just stuff like that. But the other thing you can do even with your existing friends as you can become the boss. So it turns out there's a secret with humans where we are too many. What's the old slogan too many
Indians and that I don't do any cheating Cooks in the kitchen. Yeah, are too many Indians and none of chiefs. Yeah. So anyway, the point is if you step up to a leadership position and tell your friends what you're doing, you're going to find everyone listens to you because very few people are willing to take the initiative. So you could say, guess what? Guys, dinner's at my house. We're going to do like a do-it-yourself Sushi party which turns out, it's way more fun than going out for sushi. Yeah. Or we can like you can invent all kinds of stuff and you become a social organizer just, you know, a little did they know they start doing?
Your stuff that's not as expensive and and then suddenly, everyone is following you, you end up with more friends because social leaders are the ones that get all the all the friends and that's kind of what you could even say that my own hobby of blogging has caused this. So now I command a legion of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people and I tell them what's fun to do and you know biking is fun and making your own food and suddenly there's lots of people to draw from and there's like a hundred of them
Coming over to our house later this week or two public park near my house. Oh wow. Share in these values. You know it's like that's always only
people.
Yes and that's the other thing is I encourage people to gather. So I've been formally designated Longmont Colorado as the future badass Utopia, capital of the United States, and all people who are into a, you know, natural lifestyle and outdoorsy and helping each other out. And
Chuckling about are fortunate lives together and sharing beers on front. Porches should move here right now and I will help you and we'll we'll all be friends instantly. So that's already happening to a certain degree. There's a bunch of people who have already moved
here. All my, I actually I'm actually thinking about coming out there for the winter. Oh yeah, it's a boulder actually.
Yeah, that sounds good. Well, we'll hook up once you're here and I'll dad asked Utopia will spread once again. And see notice how I'm becoming the boss here. I'm telling ya telling you what to do and suddenly you're excited to do it. You can follow this model yourself.
Oh
man. So we have a I mean again just kind of back to the engineer thing because we were lucky in that. We make a lot of money. We've a lot of people in our audience who do not make a lot of money. So, you know, getting up to $800,000 because they don't spend that much, they're going to say, well, I can never happen to me. What do you say to people who maybe don't make as much? Like, is it?
Are they forsaken now?
No, definitely not. In fact, I think it's all about perspective. Like you just said, I make a lot of money. That's the right perspective to have because there's a lot of people sitting right next to New York. They think man that guy doesn't make anything. I don't see how it could even pay for his nannies with that kind of income, right. And we are all we all make a lot of money in this country and that's the first thing to think about. I make a lot of money is what you say, and holy shit. I can make even more money just by with all these opportunities that are around me so that tends to happen over.
Time to. And then if you feel really grateful for everything that you do have, like you can get a complete meal of healthy ingredients from the grocery store for like a dollar or two anywhere in the country that that means we're all incredibly Rich compared to the cost of our true needs. So start with that attitude, and then build it from there. So, I refer I retired with $800,000 that's too much. That was based on expanding expecting to spend thirty two thousand dollars a year, which is a super gluttonous. Crazy,
I would like cars and Jet travel and all this other stuff. You don't need that to be happy. Like, you should start with lower expectations, and if you focus on happiness, you can really spend a lot less than that. And you might surprise yourself and suddenly realize that you do have the internet thousand, you're like, okay, well maybe I'll spend a little bit more, but you just got to start with realizing, you need nothing. You really need nothing, and everything. You have is more than you need already, and then just build it up from there.
So you, you had said,
You know, we're in this country and we have like all these off awesome opportunities around us. And I know from reading your blog and just us talking, like, if you've always been like a kind of, for lack of a better term side, hustle guy, like, did you have some side things before you retired? You think that everyone should kind of have a side thing. So they can step away from, you know, the day-to-day grind and supplement their income to make it a little bit faster. Hmm, I
don't think you need that.
I wasn't really planning to make money after retirement. Based on my original Savings Plan it's just it turns out that I'm Only Happy When I'm accomplishing something. So I tend to always work on something like to learn and do things that are challenging throughout the day and sometimes you get get paid for doing that kind of stuff. So I think everybody should have a plan for after work. It doesn't have to be money making, but it that's a nice shortcut if you're in one of these higher in
Come or no lower-income groups like Andrew talked about earlier. Yeah, you know, let's say you make $25,000 a year and you still want to quote retire early. Well maybe you won't be retiring off a giant chunk of assets. Maybe you'll just be quitting your, your crappy job at the department store and having a little bit of income from Investments or maybe you have a rental house or a duplex that you share with other people. And you'll start your side business, which maybe brings in like five thousand a year or something small.
You can go a lot sooner into Freedom, if you have a little bit of savings and a little bit of side hustle income. So it's really a balance, but everyone's got to do something. If you retire early, you can't just retire, early and then go straight straight to the wheelchair and the RV and stuff. Like, right, right, it's just not, it's not a good
plan now and I want to, I want to talk about the site. So what you had you had mentioned that you saw this, your
Ends and people around. You were asking a lot of questions about how you did it. And then you decided to make the site is that what happened?
More or less? Yeah, I was, I wanted to wasn't for my friends, but it was, it was addressed to society. In general, like an open letter to society. Is the basic
thing now, do you do you make, do you make money from the site? Now, how much time you've had it for a couple years now?
Yeah, it's over three years old now and unexpectedly. It does make quite a bit of money now and I'm
Abel. I'm not haven't used that to increase my spending at all. Basically, if anything, I've used it to decrease my spending because now I feel more comfortable. Like, you know, I have more of a cushion and I want to use it for projects related to the blog and I have been, as well as the upkeep of a Blog itself. But yeah, that's one of my happy unexpected stories that I like to joke about on the blog is like shit. Even just writing about not working suddenly earns
money. Yeah. And how do you earn money from
it? It's the usual kind of blog stuff so affiliate.
You have affiliate programs. Like, I have a page, it's called the recommendations page. And I wrote down all the products and stuff that I use, because people are always asking me anyway. And then some of those companies will pay you commissions as well, right. So, I looked up those ones, join their affiliate programs and then wherever there's an option, like, Republic Wireless is one of, that's my, my mobile phone company. I was excited about that company long before I had even heard from them in person. And I was like, yeah, Republic.
Carlos. I'm going to use that. Then they called me because I knew about the blog and like, hey, do you want to be one of our Affiliates? And we'll pay you like twenty dollars, whenever somebody signs up for the service and I said yeah, that's perfect. It's perfect for my values because you know, I can the blog can earn money even while I just do what I would have done anyway. Right so that's my rule, you know, that's my general guideline it for making money on the blog is I'm not allowed to change. I'm not allowed to endorse stuff that I don't already use, but if I do use something that I'm
To endorse it and accept money, it's not pure like Ralph Nader, our Consumer Reports but it's good enough for me and matches what I feel is, right? Yeah. And you just recently changed
design
that will truly looks awesome.
Why'd you what made you do that?
It was just a side effect of the blog getting bigger. I realized that the old beginner blog where it's just a reverse chronology chronology. Like list of Post. Yeah, wasn't quite right for all the new people and I looked at the stats and there's like thousands of new people showing up
Every day. And then if my new if they show up and just see whatever I happen to write about, most recently, that's not necessarily what you want your new readers to see, right? So there's a front page now which has got like, what I call the Triple M Classics and featured posts, which are sort of stuff that's designed to be useful to someone who's never been there before. And hopefully interesting enough to encourage them to read more. And then there's also like if you go to a Money Mustache.com Blog, then that's the old style and that's what the existing readers.
I prefer because they've already read everything else and they just want to see what's new.
Now besides the blog, do you have any cool projects that you're doing right now or that are coming up in your future that you want to its
kind of blog related? Yeah, the blog is taken over a bit of my life because it's become so fun. So I've shut down a little bit of my other stuff that I used to be into your like I don't do professional carpentry work anymore. I just work on my own house and that way I can free. You, free up, more time to write on the blog. I'm gonna write a book related to the
Blog cool during the next year and and part of that is I'm going to sell my rental house. So I don't have to think about that. I'm a really like really wimpy kind of single Tasker in my life in the if I have stuff planned or if I have outstanding obligations they consume all my limited brain power. So I can't do anything new so I have to shut down other stuff to focus on new stuff and that's kind of the stage I'm in right now but the blog is still interesting. Like I it encourages me to do stuff, so I'm doing science.
It's related to super low home energy consumption, for example, and fitness, and various things related to social change. And, you know, I just do experiments and write about on the blog. It's not like that plan. Yeah nothing too specific right now. There's a few secret ones but they'll just come out whenever I get around to writing about
them when you feel the the passion sir yeah.
Oh like one of them's a documentary. I'm gonna go on across u.s. bye.
Icicle kind of Extravaganza where I show up in different cities, in people who claim that their city is not bike-friendly and you can't back to work there. I'm going to show up with bikes at their house and then say we're back into work today. Fuck, I'll get
on. Oh, that's
awesome. You know like biking in Houston and all this other stuff where people say that you have to have a car and it's just totally wrong. The whole United States is totally fine for biking already and if we all start biking, it's going to get way, more friendly overnight. So that's one of my missions as
That's where my side projects. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got a filmmaker on board and we're gonna do this to her, but I just have to free up a bit of time because I've been traveling too much through the summer. So, taking a break before the documentary
begins. Yeah, I have to, I guess I have to mention a Andrew loves this video. It's called ever see motherfucking
bike. Oh yeah. Yeah, it's pretty funny that he lies that
I found it from you. Yeah, I okay everywhere. Yeah
he's posted everywhere. I
It's making fun of bikes a little bit. Yeah. Because it's like talking about us being rude and right block, the elevator and giving the finger to cars for no reason, but it's just a nice little hip-hop, track and fun it's catchy. So I still, I still forward it around.
So I have to kind of wrap things up and I this has been enlightening to say the least, but what is your? We think you're like, major piece of advice is to your listener, or your readers, or whoever you talk to.
A daily basis. What's your what's your big? You know, advice for them?
Well the long-term people would have different advice because they already know everything I'm going to say and yeah for those people I just say yeah let's hang out or let's keep doing what we're doing. But for new people, I would say change your entire perspective on life and learn about happiness itself and start embracing hardship and learning about your own psychology and the human animal. In general get the bigger picture is zoom out of the department store in the shopping bag and the fancy.
Our and just start learning about like, what are you anyway? Like what are you? This chunk of meat on this planet and how did you get here? And what's the purpose of you being alive? Start going back from those roots and then that's going to help you re-evaluate what it really means, like, what's your real goal in life, what it means to be human. Yeah, and that's that's what you got to do. If you want to completely fix your life and have control of your money and your spending and stuff, you see, you got to just throw out the whole package of consumer junk and and get some
Deeper and more scientific understanding of what's really going on
here. That really interests me. Do you have? Like, I've watched documentaries on Netflix, like there's documentary called happy, which I found pretty interesting. And I actually just recently watched man on wire which is which was amazing which just talks about. You know, this guy just had a passion his whole life and it didn't matter what it took to do it. He just had to do it and these are any resources or things that people can look at to study.
The happiness or you just human nature in general? Yeah, I think you should you should
study happiness and human nature. One of them is called the art of Happiness, which is a collaboration between a u.s. psychologist and the Dalai Lama himself. Mmm, that's pretty neat thing. It's studying happiness, from a very practical version of Buddhism. And so, that's cool. That's that's like, looking at your own feelings inside. But I also like to think of the outside picture like,
They're learning about culture and Society, learn more about like science and evolution and really understand like, whoa, what are humans like what are humans? Anyway, instead of like what is this group of humans doing or what's that group of humans doing? That's too much. Like he said/she said, I like to learn about the whole thing like how to atoms get formed in the in the compressed centers of stars. And how does that result in planets forming? And how does life form out of that? And understanding this big picture is really fascinating and then it makes you say like holy shit.
I guess I don't need that Gucci handbag after all. It's like that's just seem so shallow and yeah, we're to what's really going on. So, like study the whole universe and understand, you know, just ignore. That's why I don't watch the news. Me, neither. And I don't like study what's happening in this or that political Battle of the day like that's just way too small potatoes. Yeah. Temporary know, you gotta unless you're actually in that field and you're like a political adviser, you got a bigger job until you're like,
You know, up with the big guns of science you might as well learn about learn about the big picture and then you can, you know, and you can engage your little side Hobbies of being interested in golf or politics to. But, you know, I start with a big picture and I
think a good resource for that would be watching Cosmos.
Oh yes, I was just going to say that Cosmos is brand-new. One of the most interesting. Most graphically beautiful summaries, as amazing of everything and the Neil deGrasse guy, really love that guys like
One to watch Alcatel. He's like a science nerd who just got thrown into TV. Yep. But you can see, he's really genuine, he's not plastic, he at all.
Yeah, it's the guy that made Family Guy he's like the producer that show and really yeah so far like and the wife of Carl Sagan is also one of the writers on the show. So it's like are the original Cosmos has a lot to do with it because it was an old PBS thing. And, you know that show is now a Netflix, it got put on Netflix pretty quickly because it is mind-blowing. And if you
You want to feel small. You feel real small. When you watch that show?
Yeah, I love it. Which is something I perspective. Yes. Yeah, with each one that comes out. We just get it as soon as possible. Everybody snuggled in the three of us. Yeah. Best screen on the best sound and just absorb every pixel that show because it's really good. It is really good. And
so, we're so besides you have Mister Money Mustache.com, where else can people find you?
That's the only place. I don't have any stuff for sale and unless you
Longmont and stop by my house. So I'm not really not really out there too much. And how many on social media, right? Oh yes. That's true. Have Twitter account. Cool under mr. Weenie mustache. And there's a Money Mustache Facebook page, but those are just kind of little funny appendages where I try to get people to go to the blog, which is where the real action is, right. Cool.
That's awesome, man. I really appreciate this chat.
Well, thanks a lot. It was certainly fun and good luck with your own. Listen Money Matters. Yeah, it's got a catchy enough name that. It's gonna go big. It's got a good.
Amount of syllables the podcast is doing well. So we're, you know, we're getting out there being a little Brash and, you know, trying to be a badass.
That's good. Well, I wish you the best and I'll see you soon. All right. Yeah, definitely couple a couple weeks. We'll be in Fink on together.
Yes, it's true. Perfect. And if you guys got questions for the show, least you can email us and enlist in Money Matters at gmail.com and real quick. If you like the show of course, go on, iTunes, and subscribe. That's what we need you to do. If you like the show, get it. We do want every single day, seven days a week and you
Get it directly into your phone or whatever you listen to podcast even stitchers well and please leave a review. If you can, we have interviewed I want to read real quick. It's a short one from WB bade or wbb Aid. Who knows? Although all the usernames are super weird, but that's cool. Mine's knob skis. So I commiserate and it's from the United States, and it's five stars very informative, great ideas. As a recent graduate preparing to enter the investment World. These guys have been instrumental
Lynn setting a baseline for learning very informative funny and filled with great ideas. So thank you for that amazing short. But amazing review and we love reading them at the end of the show. And guys, you can check out our website listed money matters.com and we have a toolbox much like the Mister Money Mustache resources page where we give out all of our things and tools and products that we use personally and that's found at listen money matters.com slash toolbox so that's it. Mister Money, Mustache Pete.
Thank you so much for being on the show again. Yes, thank you. All right, thanks again guys. And we look forward to the next episode, The later later, man.
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